Images from Rakhine state in Myanmar show burning villages and the bodies of massacred men, women and children. This is just the latest clash of the twin evils that underpin the misery that envelopes humankind - religion and nationalism.
The " Rohingya " are Muslim and the rest of the population of Myanmar are Buddhist and it seems that even Buddhist monks are actively helping the Myanmar army to drive these tribal people over the border into Bangladesh. A population of about a million people is being displaced.
The resentment goes back a long way to the days when Myanmar was called Burma and it was a part of the British Empire. The British also ruled India, which has since split into India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and when labour was needed in Burma the Brits simply called in workers from over the border and allowed them to settle in new villages. The fact that they were of a different religion was ignored.
The bible records the enmity between people who worshipped different Gods. Most of the wars over the centuries have had religion as the cause of their conflict or the curse of nationalism which has one tribe thinking it is superior to its neighbour. The reason for these wars was either to gain more home territory or to force their religion on others.
Sadly, so many of these armed conflicts have been based on internal divisions within the same religion. For several centuries the wars in Europe were mainly between Catholicism trying to reimpose its domination on the Protestant reformation, and in todays world Islam is angrily split between Sunni and Shia.
Even recent history records the sheer savagery that religion or nationalism can produce. We were horrified when images of the Holocaust appeared at the end of the second world war, but lessons were not learned and we have since seen the slaughter in Rwanda and places like Sudan, and all that paled into insignificance with the religious wars happening in the Middle East. Europe added its contribution with Kosovo - and Srebrenica.
It seems that we are destined to follow different religions and those religions are incapable of reaching a form of settlement where they embrace each other with mutual respect and live together in harmony. A split within Islam is actively pursuing terrorism with the intent of creating a world war between Islam and Christianity.
The whole purpose of religion was to prepare the soul for the afterlife. Now that we have reached the capability of extinguishing all forms of life on this planet with the nuclear option, religion in all its forms seem a specious argument.
If we ever managed to find a common religion, no doubt war and insanity would find a new home in politics !
No comments:
Post a Comment